I actually had a really simple idea that would have helped me a lot while discovering the tool. I
hate most animations, however smoothly rotating the ring would do wonders for people understanding what's going on here. You just need to decide which way to rotate ;)
> Would you like to give hTime a go and test it for some days?
Perhaps... but to be perfectly honest, I haven't yet decided if I love or hate this idea yet.
To give you an idea about how I'm thinking of this, first and foremost hTime is a time format, meaning it's just some mapping of letters to a local time's hour. The most interesting part to me is that, since I read left to right, I also see the locale information first as opposed to last. You can rightfully argue that the locale is needed to interpret the rest of the time, so this is the correct way to format world times. On the other hand, world times are the same as local times for everyone within earshot of me, so I would never bother prefixing things locally.
Secondly, it's a tool for helping people with world clocks and scheduling.
My concern is that there are better solutions to the first thing, despite any improvements made to the second. For example, would it not be better to simply prefix the timezone information directly? For example, it's currently Z22:36. We do use more characters, especially if we want to be able to extend this to local times too (e.g. +5-03:36). I might be tempted to start trying to lay this out so the math works out for (+5) adding directly to the hour as 5+03:36 = Z22:36, but now I realize a larger problem with all this... dates.
Placing the offset in the middle of the full time string 2021-10-20 together with 22:36 requires thought. I'm tempted to like it, because the timezone offset is obviously much more related to the time than the date, but moving it closer to the date really couldn't hurt, could it?
Take either hTime, or my example:
- 2021-10-20+5-03:36
- 2021-10-20Z22:36
- 2021-10-20Q:36
We just replace the 'T' in ISO-8601 with the 'Z' part or with nothing before an hTime. Now I get to complain that 'Z' looks way too much like 2... Meanwhile https://thehtime.com/ hasn't loaded and I can't remember the mapping for the current time, so I don't think I've written my example consistently.
I think that's the part of hTime I like the least. I have no hope of decoding it without knowing what it is. Meanwhile an 8601 datetime stamp can be somewhat inferred. So to quote you, if I may, "[the] main thing is we find a good way to get rid of time zone math!". But we can't get rid of the time zone math... it's just either arithmetic, or a special code.
Anyway, I'm just bored right now over here thinking on paper. Always glad to hear that my feedback is somewhat useful. Thanks.
> Would you like to give hTime a go and test it for some days?
Perhaps... but to be perfectly honest, I haven't yet decided if I love or hate this idea yet.
To give you an idea about how I'm thinking of this, first and foremost hTime is a time format, meaning it's just some mapping of letters to a local time's hour. The most interesting part to me is that, since I read left to right, I also see the locale information first as opposed to last. You can rightfully argue that the locale is needed to interpret the rest of the time, so this is the correct way to format world times. On the other hand, world times are the same as local times for everyone within earshot of me, so I would never bother prefixing things locally.
Secondly, it's a tool for helping people with world clocks and scheduling.
My concern is that there are better solutions to the first thing, despite any improvements made to the second. For example, would it not be better to simply prefix the timezone information directly? For example, it's currently Z22:36. We do use more characters, especially if we want to be able to extend this to local times too (e.g. +5-03:36). I might be tempted to start trying to lay this out so the math works out for (+5) adding directly to the hour as 5+03:36 = Z22:36, but now I realize a larger problem with all this... dates.
Placing the offset in the middle of the full time string 2021-10-20 together with 22:36 requires thought. I'm tempted to like it, because the timezone offset is obviously much more related to the time than the date, but moving it closer to the date really couldn't hurt, could it?
Take either hTime, or my example:
- 2021-10-20+5-03:36
- 2021-10-20Z22:36
- 2021-10-20Q:36
We just replace the 'T' in ISO-8601 with the 'Z' part or with nothing before an hTime. Now I get to complain that 'Z' looks way too much like 2... Meanwhile https://thehtime.com/ hasn't loaded and I can't remember the mapping for the current time, so I don't think I've written my example consistently.
I think that's the part of hTime I like the least. I have no hope of decoding it without knowing what it is. Meanwhile an 8601 datetime stamp can be somewhat inferred. So to quote you, if I may, "[the] main thing is we find a good way to get rid of time zone math!". But we can't get rid of the time zone math... it's just either arithmetic, or a special code.
Anyway, I'm just bored right now over here thinking on paper. Always glad to hear that my feedback is somewhat useful. Thanks.